


The Other Matter

by Survivah



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Medium Burn, Offscreen Joe/OFC, Wikipedia-skim levels of historical accuracy, probably not comics compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:27:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25790566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Survivah/pseuds/Survivah
Summary: He wants Yusuf to hold his hand again. Grab his ankle. Flick his ear. Thrust his sword into his chest and breath into his mouth.Yet, they have the long ocean of eternity ahead of them. These whims are nothing but a swell under their ship: gone as soon as they come. Nicolo knows better than to jump overboard and drown alone trying to chase them.-----Alternate title: "You'd Feel Pretty Weird If You Developed a Crush on the Only Other Immortal You Know, Right?"
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 283
Kudos: 2259
Collections: Cat's must read fics (mostly Dean/Cas and Joe/Nicky)





	The Other Matter

**Author's Note:**

> Well, six months of quarantine have finally prompted me to shake off several years of rust and write fanfiction again. I got really excited about the historical aspects of this ship, then realized that writing for it would mean actually doing _research_. So...if anything doesn't strike you as accurate, let's say that it was lost to the historical record. 
> 
> Big thanks to[ this post](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25598143/chapters/62128573) about how to write Arab Muslim characters for this fandom by ElephantOfAfrica. As a nonreligious white American, I found myself out of my depth, so being able to read the perspective of somebody who knows more than I do was really useful.

**1097 AD**

They said the Crusade was to be a battle for the heart of Christendom, the holiest of holy wars, a reckoning for every usurping heathen. Volunteers bubbled up from all corners, and rumors flew of a mass ascension to Heaven upon the gates of Jerusalem. In the long march to Antioch, the soldiers’ footsteps seemed not to slow with weariness, but instead hasten with miraculous energy as the prospect of glory drew closer.

Nicolo hadn’t been certain of any of it until the dreams came. While he suspected that he’d been drawn to the brotherhood out of purer intentions than others, in his moments of solitude, a worming thought whispered to him about man’s hubris, and the folly of mortal men. Has not every man been certain that his war was just?

Yet after the dreams began, he knew the doubt had been nothing but a temptation. True, he must have been far from the only man in the battalion to dream of fighting the Muslim army, but he knew in an unshakeable corner of his soul that his were visions from God. Each night, he saw a Muslim soldier, eyes flashing inscrutably, the hint of a beard, the high curve of a prideful cheekbone, and each night, Nicolo tried to raise his sword to slay him, but the soldier faded before he could. A divine prophecy. 

At home in Genoa, as he packed his saddlebags with his sword and his worries, Nicolo had wondered how the saints had known their visions were sent by God. Hadn’t every man experienced a “vision” of his own wishful thinking? Any loud man with a tankard of ale and a wandering eye would be happy to tell you of his. Months later, with the battle so close that a man could squint at the horizon and nearly see it, Nicolo lays awake at the camp, fresh born from a dream, and knows what the saints had known: this is no mere dream or proud fantasy.

He prays for the wisdom to carry out God’s will.

:::

The following morning, in his first true battle, he prays for God to spare him from death, or at least to spare him from the indignity of shitting his pants when he is killed.

The rousing speeches ferried straight from the Pope’s mouth hadn’t spoken of the stinking smell of shit, the sick squelch of blades boring into flesh, or the frank underwhelming horror of an arrow in the eye of your closest friend five minutes into the fight. Nicolo’s horse was slain not long after, and Nicolo was left to the mercy of ground battle.

Once, struck by a lightning flash of adolescent stupidity, he’d tarried too long before bringing the fishing boat to shore and gotten caught in a storm. He is reminded of this folly now, as he sways to and fro past the churning legs of horses and the rushing waves of fighters. In the storm, the worst part had been the knowledge that he’d seen the clouds on the horizon and ignored them, certain he could handle the challenge. Nicolo had thought he’d matured in the years since. Folly again.

Blinking the sweat from his eyes, Nicolo curses his own vanity and foolishness when a man shoves towards him through the throng, bound towards him. 

Rather, _the_ man. The dream come to life. He has the same glinting eyes and the same incomprehensible scrabble of carvings in his chest plate, the same iron clench of a fist. 

Nicolo had thought the man in his dreams was a metaphor; the hordes of the Islamic Empire made flesh. In defeating the man, he was defeating the enemy whole. Now, he realizes that he had spent too long with his nose buried in poetry books.

Who is Nicolo to deny a sign from God, placed before him so plainly? He raises his sword for a downward slash. Crusader swords are closer to battering rams than knives, blunt enough to hold the blade’s edge in your fist, but heavy enough to crush a collarbone or smash in a helmet, as this ill-fated heathen will soon discover. He swings the blade, gritting his teeth as he delivers his first fatal blow of the battle.

A scimitar shoves through the gap in his armor between his chest and arm. Nicolo gasps. He tries to gasp again, and finds he cannot breathe.

His eyes are blurring. From tears or sweat or pain, he cannot tell. He looks at his attacker. They are so close. They could have been dancing. No, if any two youths in town dared to dance so close, they would have been yanked apart by wiser hands. Nicolo can smell the miasma of the other man’s breath. He can see a bead of sweat caught in his curling beard. He wonders if he is the first man his attacker has ever killed. His commander would say that the Muslims are bloodthirsty from birth, but the man’s eyes, so familiar, shadowed by the metal of his helmet, are not so inscrutable from this distance. He is staring at the wound he made by his hands. He looks surprised.

He looks distracted. Nicolo brings the weight of the sword’s pommel down upon the man’s head.

They fall to the ground. The scimitar pushes in deeper from the motion. Blood falls from Nicolo’s mouth. Earth to earth. The soldier mutters something in his strange language, dazed.

Nicolo's hands tremble as they scrabble to his belt. _Do not let the enemy prevail_. They are slippery with blood, eels on a gutting table, a malformed foal left on the stable floor. He can feel the warmth of his attacker’s stomach against his hands.

His knife. Sharp. Clever. A neck, bare to him.

Nicolo had thought it would feel like butchering a cow. It did not. He thought he might feel victorious. He did not. 

Having fulfilled the dream’s prophecy, he lets his head drop to the foreign soldier’s chest, and prepares to be taken to Heaven.

:::

With the copper of blood still coating his mouth, Nicolo gasps to life. He feels his body be shoved, but cannot gather his wits to see who or what had done it.

The same certainty that had told him the dreams were not just dreams told him that he had not arrived in Heaven. He opens his eyes and sees the battlefield. The storm surge of war has shifted—where once bodies had run and fought, now many lay still upon the ground, while the remaining fighters have danced themselves a few hundred yards to the east. One hundred thousand Crusaders had come, and now how many lay on the ground? How many does Nicolo know by name?

Nicolo clasps a hand to his wound, and instead finds a curious place where his wound had once been. Though his hands are caked with sticky brown blood, he can feel nothing but whole skin. He had felt his heart stop, but now he was crawling to his knees, squinting at the ground. Blinking.

A miracle. No room for doubt. He has been spared for some holy purpose that Nicolo dares not guess at. He does, however, wonder why God might choose to favor a man who could not last more than one day on the battlefield. Then he spares himself a hoarse, hysterical chuckle at the image of Friar Bianchi’s horrified face had he dared to share such a heretical thought with him.

Nicolo rises to his feet, surprising himself with how steady they are. He will return to battle, survive another day, then see what new prophecy his dreams hold for him.

He pauses. The soldier from his dreams isn’t on the ground below him. Nicolo whips his head around and sees a figure making a furtive retreat towards the Muslim horde.

Once again, his purpose is not as mysterious as he first thought. He’d been revived because he had failed to defeat his foe.

“Stand and fight me!” Nicolo calls out, in a show of uncharacteristic bravado. His words echo across the field.

The soldier turns, though he could not have understood Nicolo's words. Even from a distance, Nicolo can see the man startle at the sight of him.

This time, Nicolo is ready. He side-steps the man’s scimitar and slams his sword into the back of the man’s neck. He hears the snap of vertebrae. When the man crumples to the ground, Nicolo slices at every pulse point easily available to him.

It is only after he has crossed the ridge on the way back to camp that he stops to wonder how a man he thought he had wounded fatally had been well enough to run at him with a sword a second time.

:::

In the following weeks of battle, it all becomes clear to Nicolo .

The strange soldier on the battlefield was some breed of demon, or witch, or otherwise unholy, undying creature, and Nicolo has been tasked with bringing about his end. To aid him in his quest, he has been gifted with immortality. 

He never tells any of his comrades in arms. At first, it’s out of hesitation: can he be sure the fight was real? Had the second fight been with a different man altogether?

Nicolo dies by the enemy soldier’s hand once more and is certain. He recognizes the man as well as he recognizes his own pulse.

Then, he doesn’t tell anyone because he is a student of history. Many an old religious text tells of holy men and women picked up by the heavy hand of fate, and rarely do they find a believing ear in their time. Friar Bianchi would tan his hide for making such comparisons, but Nicolo has pulled an arrow from his eye and found his vision restored. His hand has been smashed under a hoof, yet worried free the cork from his waterskin within the hour. He is likelier to be burned for witchcraft than hailed as blessed. 

Nicolo stabs the soldier, severs his head from his body, severs all his limbs, and still finds him on the field the next day, scimitar at the ready. They seek each other out now. Nicolo can almost always find the man at the western edge of the field, where they have a silent accord to meet.

Then, Nicolo doesn’t tell anyone because he doesn’t want any other Crusader killing the soldier for him. It is a finger twisting feeling that he could not explain aloud, if asked.

In a way, seeing the man on the field was like running into a friend in the square. In the midst of helmeted faces cutting indiscriminately, they share a history. They share a secret.

Yet, Nicolo hates the soldier. What force has brought him here? What unholy purpose is he set to fulfill? Does he think, in turn, that his god has granted him immortality so that he may kill Nicolo?

The battle has struggled outside the city gates for weeks without progress when Nicolo and the soldier manage to kill each other at the same time once again.

Nicolo's eyes open to the unwelcoming bright sky, and he hears a cough next to him.

“Live to fight another day, do we, demon?” Nicolo groans. His neck is still dislocated, so he cannot turn to face the man.

The man in question grumbles something in his language. Of course Nicolo doesn’t know what it means, but it reminds him, jarringly, of his brother’s scowling rejoinders from underneath his bedsheets on cold mornings.

_Leave me alone. Why are you bothering me._

“If you would only die, then I would stop bothering you,” Nicolo responds, mostly to entertain himself.

This round, the enemy soldier recovers earlier. He plunges his sword into Nicolo's heart.

:::

Not long after that, the men start officially calling it the Siege of Antioch. The pitched melee fades into long weeks of volleys from a distance. The walls of the city hold strong. The archers’ hands bleed.

The cavalry, or men-who-were-cavalry-before-their-horses-died, grumble outwardly at the stalemate, but Nicolo knows that not a one of them begrudges the opportunity to lick their wounds.

Nicolo has no wounds to lick, and therefore a restless energy with no outlet. The crystal clear prophetic dreams have ceased, but the demon soldier still follows him in his own murkier, mortal dreams.

Antioch and the lands surrounding it have their share of native Christians, a discovery which surprises Nicolo and many of the men, who had assumed the land had been overrun with heathens. Perhaps the Pope had known, but the knowledge hadn’t filtered down to the likes of them. Some of the Crusaders grumble that these people, with their Arab looks, cannot truly be Christians, but Nicolo supposes that if they are here because this is the land of Jesus, perhaps once, all Christians looked like these people.

More importantly, they are willing to teach him a few words in Arabic when they come to the camps with carts, selling food. Know thine enemy.

::

Months pass, and the carts of food stop.

Eventually, Nicolo wishes his horse had lived, not so that he could ride him, but so that he could eat him.

Eventually, Nicolo learns that he can die of starvation and live again, but Lord, his bones can creak and his cheeks can hollow. When he is revived again, there’s still nothing to eat, and he feels himself grow lethargic as any mortal man.

The walls of Antioch are just visible from the camp, mocking. The Crusaders are waiting out the clock, hoping that their additional troops and supplies arrive before their original troops die. Nicolo wonders if the people inside the city are weighing the same options—the armies of Christ prevented any food from entering the city, in the days when there was food.

Four other men had come from Genoa with him; they are all dead. His first friend felled by the arrow had been the lucky one.

“It feels like swimming through syrup,” Antoni from Venice mumbles one night. “Time has become so slow.”

“And the syrup is also choking you,” observes Piero.

“I would kill for syrup,” groans Matteo. He has been lying next to the fire for several hours now, and Nicolo has a suspicion that Matteo does not have the strength to sit up.

Antoni complains, “I haven’t fought for so long; when supplies come and we return to battle, I’ll topple under the weight of my own sword.”

Silence falls, and none of them around the circle have the energy to stoke the conversation alive again.

Nicolo wonders if this Purgatory could be caused by his own inaction. He could not have been given a clearer task, and yet here he is, lolling about the camp, waiting for something to happen. The idea deepens the pit of nausea that has been brewing in his stomach for days.

Though his thoughts are sluggish and weary, he manages to come up with a plan. He knows the demon soldier must be within the walls of Antioch, hunkered down and waiting with the rest of them. Entering Antioch is no easy task—they would not have lingered here for so long if it were—but in the lulls between skirmishes, the great gates crack open to carry in the bodies of the dead for some unknown purpose.

Nicolo is quite good at being dead.

A moonless night comes, and Nicolo drags himself towards the city. He remembers that a volley of arrows was exchanged earlier in the day, and sure enough, three Arab soldiers lie dead near the walls. Nicolo exchanges his rancid clothing for the armor of the body nearest to his height. Then, as the dawn draws near, he smashes his face with a rock until nobody could bear to look at it for long enough to tell that he is Genoese. A few more good hits and he is dead.

::

He wakes, but has enough of a grasp on his wits to keep his eyes closed. He hears the splash of water echoing across a high ceiling, and quiet murmurs in Arabic. He judges it to be far enough away that he dares to crack open one eye.

A man of Antioch, in robes that look well worn but enviably clean, stands over a soldier—he must have been brought into the city with Nicolo. He lowers a square of cloth into a bowl of water, and wipes it across the soldier’s forehead. Nicolo watches as the man whispers something to the soldier, then gently picks up his limp hand to rinse the blood from his fingers.

A sacrament. Bathing the dead.

Nicolo would not have been given that dignity by his own men if he had been felled for good.

The slow sound of washing is so calming that Nicolo, starving and exhausted, is tempted to fall asleep, cold tile floor be damned, until he realizes that if the man with the bowl of water (a priest?) comes to him, he will reveal white skin and a pulse under the layers of caked on blood.

So when someone calls for the priest from beyond an archway, Nicolo stumbles to the door on the other side of the room, and in a stroke of luck, finds that it opens to the outside.

Looking around, Nicolo determines that he is standing in the alley next to a mosque, if the minaret is anything to go by. The side door he had slipped through must be so that the dead can be carried in for rites without being paraded through the rest of the building.

A clever arrangement, Nicolo thinks dazedly, one he might suggest, in the unlikely event that he ever returns to Genoa.

Though his crushed face has mostly recovered, he is still covered in blood and has the face of a Crusader; no hope of blending in. There is a pile of sacks and crates near the mouth of the alley—food supplies, long since emptied—and Nicolo buries himself in them.

The day passes slowly, but Nicolo finds that he is not bored. The alley looks out into a busy street, and he watches the passing people with an interest that surprises him.

A mother and her child, who is moaning and pretending that his feet no longer work. _Pick me up, mother._

Two men who Nicolo knows at once must be brothers, catching one another in the street. _There you are, what nonsense have you been up to?_

A teenager, jogging but pretending not to be, on his way to the main gate of the mosque—he is late, but too proud to scurry.

Every one of them has hollow cheeks, and their clothes hang loosely. The tones of their voices are casual, just like the men at camp: doom and ruin loom overhead, but you cannot have the bad taste to talk about it all the time.

Nicolo is so distracted that it takes a moment for him to notice his soldier walking straight past his vision. Once he does, he startles, rising up to his knees. A crate rattles to the ground, and the soldier looks straight at him.

They’re of an age, Nicolo realizes. With his helmet off and his face clean, the soldier is just another man on the street. He looks tired: bruises from sleepless nights line his eyes. Combined with his gentle cloud of black hair and slender hands, one could mistake him for vulnerable.

The man is so much smaller without his armor. His robes hang off of his shoulders limply—Nicolo's clothing has done the same for some time now. There is a thread at the cuff of his sleeve that he mindlessly tugs at, even as he stares Nicolo down with horror.

Of the two of them, who looks more like a demon now? Nicolo, crouching in the dirt and shadows, crusted over with layers of blood, or the man, walking tall to the mosque in clean robes on an autumn day?

The man turns to a youth who Nicolo hadn’t noticed. He says something urgently—Nicolo makes out “go, go” in Arabic—and the youth flees towards the mosque. The man’s shoulders are defensive, as though he expects Nicolo to lunge forward and try to eat the boy. 

Nicolo feels a bubble of shame rise to the surface of his stomach and pop.

His ward a safe distance away, the man surges into the alleyway, grabbing Nicolo by his collar and pulling him deeper into the shadows. Nicolo can tell that the man’s grip isn’t as strong as it used to be. He, too, can tire.

The man’s hands scrabble to Nicolo's throat, pressing, cutting off his air.

Confused, Nicolo glances towards the man’s belt. He does not wear a sword while in town, or perhaps not to the mosque. He is a man walking the streets of his city with no intention of violence, until Nicolo brought it to him like an unwelcome gift.

Nicolo could wrestle him to the ground, or press his thumbs into the man’s eyes, or spit in his face as a distraction, but, sick and tired in a place he has no business being, he realizes that he doesn’t want to.

“Wait,” he gasps, “wait.” He grasps for a word he knows in Arabic. “Please.”

The man’s eyes flick to his, but he doesn’t ease up the pressure on Nicolo's throat.

“Me... you,” Nicolo's hand cooperates to point at each of them respectively.

Nicolo casts helplessly for a word he knows. He wants to say that they have been tied together by God, or fate, or something. They share a strange affliction, both men alone with a secret in a world that hardly understands. They both know the painful horror of hearing their own heart stop, so why do they keep inflicting it upon each other? With the glory of a holy war long since faded, they are two starving men with every reason to be allies, slowly trying to kill one another in an alley.

“Brothers,” Nicolo chokes out, “me, you, brothers.”

For a hazy moment, he wonders if his accent is too terrible, or too short of breath, for the man to understand.

But his hands loosen. He sizes Nicolo up, nods, and shocks the life out of him by responding in clear, Genoese Italian: “Peace.”

Nicolo hadn’t even thought to learn that one.

::

The man spirits him through back alleys to a small, two room house. Nicolo is surprised; he would have thought the man slept in barracks. His companion clears this up by pointing at the bed in the other room and saying, again in Italian, “dead.”

There must be a number of abandoned houses by this time.

The man shuffles around in the kitchen with an unfamiliarity that does suggest he lives in barracks somewhere. This must have been the closest place he knew where they could hide.

He opens an urn and makes a noise of discovery, then holds the lid open so Nicolo can see. Water. He hands the urn to Nicolo, then returns a moment later with a rag.

Nicolo drinks from it greedily, then wets the rag and rubs it across his face. Allies, then.

The former inhabitants of the house left behind a few spare items of clothing, which Nicolo swaps for his stolen, stinking armor. From the way the man snorts softly to himself, Nicolo gathers that his new clothes are not what a fashionable young Antioch man wears.

Once Nicolo scrapes the last gristly leftovers of the past day from his body, they have both run out of tasks to busy themselves with, and the silence feels awkward.

The man clears his throat, then pats his chest. “Yusuf.”

This, Nicolo can decipher. He touches his own chest. “Nicolo.”

“You speak Arabic?” asks Yusuf.

Nicolo cannot even speak enough to tell how little he knows, so he settles for a grimace and flutter of his hands that makes Yusuf chuckle lightly.

“I...learn...because you,” Nicolo ventures.

Yusuf nods in understanding. “Because of you, I am learning of Italian,” he responds in Italian.

Something in Nicolo's chest settles. Before ever speaking a word, they have managed to share an understanding across months and miles of battlefield. He is in the right place.

::

They have no purpose in coming here, only a shared certainty that they ought to be together.

Nicolo wants to ask Yusuf about his gift: is it the same as his, how long has he known, does he know what it’s for. Whether he, too, feels a gaping uncertainty widening before him, and a lingering doubt threatening to throw him off balance into the void.

However, he has the vocabulary of a two year old, so he and Yusuf wind up sharing the mundane experience of pointing at various objects in the house and reciting the words for them.

Nicolo is trying to mime the concept of “war,” a word he determines would be relevant and useful for them both to know, when Yusuf reaches a hand towards his face.

Nicolo tenses automatically, but Yusuf only pulls a glob of viscous red matter free from his hair. Yusuf gives him a knowing look, but doesn’t comment on the flinch.

“Your-“ Yusuf points at his eyes.

“-Eyes”

“Your eyes is-“ he points out the window.

“The city?” Nicolo guesses. “The window?”

Yusuf smirks and mutters something bemusedly in Arabic too fast to follow.

“Oh, blue!” Nicolo points at the blue tiles laid into the wall to confirm.

Yusuf snaps his fingers. “Your eyes is blue. Good.”

“Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

It goes on like that for a while, until Nicolo's eyes start to tire. It isn’t late, but he finds that with food so scarce, he is tempted to sleep more and more.

The cupboards have long since been ransacked of anything edible, so Nicolo collapses straight into the bed. It’s a simple rope frame construction with a mattress of straw, but compared to his bedroll at the camp, it could be the Pope’s own bed.

Yusuf lingers in the doorway, looking sheepish.

“Do you go?” Nicolo asks. He must have a bunk at the barracks waiting for him.

Yusuf shakes his head. “I watch you.”

Nicolo isn’t sure whether Yusuf means that he plans to watch _over_ Nicolo in case of chaos in the night, or _watch Nicolo_ , in case this has all been a ruse, and Nicolo plans to slip loose and wreak havoc on innocent civilians.

Before marching to war, Nicolo was of the philosophy that it was better to assume the best of intentions in his fellow man. He was learning that this was a habit he should not have fallen out of.

He gestures towards the other side of the bed. Judging by the rest of the house, this was once a family bed, built for parents and children to all pile in with relative comfort: there was ample space.

Yusuf took the invitation, and dropped onto the bed with a weariness he had been concealing well.

As Nicolo drifted to sleep, he supposed that this was how it was meant to be all along.

::

Nicolo and Yusuf are startled awake by the clanging of an alarm bell and a shout in the street below.

Yusuf grips his arm in the dark. “War,” he whispers urgently.

So the supplies had not been so far away as they had seemed.

Nicolo scrambles to his feet, roots around for his shoes. He isn’t sure exactly what side he’s on anymore, but he has never been on the side of people who hide in their houses when an army marches into a city.

Neither is Yusuf, which is no surprise. They rush into the street and find the source of the yelling.

When Nicolo pictured breaking through the walls of Antioch, he had imagined a righteous march through the city. They would slay any attackers who approached, before taking the governor’s palace and capturing the city. Their righteousness would put the Muslim hordes to shame. Apparently some of his fellow soldiers had been imagining something different.

A pack of Crusaders—wild dogs—have surrounded a woman in the street. Nicolo may have spent the last few years celibate in an abbey, but he can tell what they’re after.

Yusuf, a step behind him, shoves something into his hand. A knife, scavenged from the kitchen; Yusuf has one to match.

Nicolo has never been a particularly good dancer. He always counts his steps and forgets what to do with his arms. His brother, ever the wordsmith, had compared him to a puppet directed by a reluctant child. At festivals, he had wondered what it might be like to be one of the dancers who could move smoothly, sure in each step, in sync with their partner.

He imagines it feels similar to fighting shoulder to shoulder with Yusuf. He hardly needs to think; he need only move, and Yusuf is there to back him up. A crusader aims for Yusuf’s back, and Nicolo catches him before the blow can land. They are two hands of one body.

It is thrilling to fight alongside a person who has no fear. Someone swings his sword at them, and Yusuf blocks it with his arm, winces, then carries on.

Freed from the burden of trying to kill Yusuf, Nicolo can appreciate him at work. Though he is no doubt weakened by the long siege, he makes up for it by being clever, feinting and surprising their foes with a leonine grace.

They should have been doing this all along.

They fell the final crusader together, Yusuf bringing him to the ground with a clever move of his foot, and Nicolo following with his knife.

The woman presses herself against the wall, breathing erratically, the white of her eyes enormous even in the dark.

Nicolo drops his knife to the ground, and, hearing the answering clatter, realizes Yusuf has just done the same.

Yusuf picks a cloth from the ground that Nicolo hadn’t even noticed, and slowly hands it back to the woman, who wraps it around her shoulders. He asks something softly in Arabic, and she shakes her head.

She looks at Yusuf, then to Nicolo. “Thank you.”

Ah, so this was God’s purpose in bringing him here. 

::

**Ten Years Later**

“Nicolo, I have returned! Cease your weeping!” Yusuf announces as he enters the cottage.

Nicolo, who had been whittling in front of the fire very calmly, responds, “if they had pomegranates at the market, I shall. Otherwise, I will be inconsolable.”

“Nicolo, friend of my heart, why have you so little faith in me?” Yusuf pulls a pomegranate from his bag and lobs it gently at Nicolo's head. “When have I ever disappointed you?”

Nicolo chuckles at Yusuf’s boisterousness. His effusive nature has only the grown the longer they have known each other. He suspects that Yusuf is showing off that he is better at languages, even ten years after he learned his first word of Genoese.

“You never cease to disappoint, Yusuf, as long as you continue to wear that tunic.”

“It’s the style! I’m telling you!” Yusuf straightens the hem.

“I don’t believe Byzantines have a sense of style,” Nicolo remarks quietly, turning the pomegranate in his hands, hoping Yusuf will take the bait.

“You are one to talk, Italian!” Yusuf retorts in delight. “Tell me, do you have any of your old shirts remaining? I need a sack with which to carry my scraps to the midden pile.”

Nicolo gazes wide-eyed at Yusuf. “I cannot believe you would insult me like this. You must make me dinner as penance.”

“Oh, put those away!” Yusuf claps a hand over Nicolo's eyes as a blindfold. “I should never have told you about your sad eyes.”

“I am only sad because I am starving,” Nicolo sighs wistfully.

Yusuf flicks his ear. “I will make dinner. But you must handle the pomegranates.”

Nicolo groans. He may have talked his way into the worse end of the bargain.

They make dinner companionably all the same. After a few weeks in this house, Yusuf has figured out the arcane art of heating the clay oven to a workable temperature, and Nicolo has become been a quick hand with a pomegranate, yet it still vexes him to pull away each sticky slip of white skin.

Later, around a mouthful of lamb, Yusuf says, “I was thinking about, you know.”

Nicolo nods.

Yusuf squints and chews thoughtfully. “I truly think we aren’t aging. In the market today, there was as good a mirror as we’ve seen in some time—I think it may have been true silver. I swear I look the same as the day we met.”

Nicolo worries at the edge of his pita. “Perhaps you’ve been blessed with youthful looks.”

“My father and mother certainly were not.”

“Yusuf!”

“It’s true! I should have grays!” Yusuf sweeps a hand through his curls demonstratively. “And you have the same baby face you’ve always had.”

Nicolo kicks at his feet. “Perhaps if we had hired a portrait artist ten years ago, we could compare, but how sharp could your memory be?”

Yusuf shrugs. “I think the shopkeeper was making flirtations towards me this afternoon.”

Rolling his eyes, Nicolo asks, “is that relevant or are you bragging?”

“What I mean is, she looked to be about the age we were ten years ago.”

“And?”

“And she was sniffing around me!”

“Perhaps she wants to meet an older man.” Nicolo smirks. “A mysterious mercenary from faraway lands. Her mother would cry tears of joy.”

Yusuf’s brows furrow, and Nicolo realizes he’s quite serious. “I couldn’t marry her, though.”

“I wasn’t truly-“

“If we cannot age, then imagine what would happen as time goes on! Outliving your grandchildren...” Yusuf trails off.

Nicolo nods. It isn’t as though they haven’t talked about it before. A born priest, he had never been drawn to marriage, but imagining life with no companionship for he couldn’t guess how long was a heavier burden.

Yusuf swallows. “Good that we have one another then.”

Nicolo allows himself a small smile. “Good, then.”

::  
**A Few Decades After That**

The job isn’t the hardest they’ve taken on in their decades of traveling together, but it is one of the longer-lived ones: a small group of people with an uncommon religion wish to migrate to friendlier lands, and need a pair of swords for hire to ensure safe passage.

Nicolo already doesn’t care for it very much. Their clients number only fifty, but practicality dictates that one of them guard the front of the procession, and the other the back.

Nicolo glances behind himself. Past the crowd of people and donkeys laden with every earthly possession, he can just make out the top of Yusuf’s head.

The headman—Nicolo's company at the front of the procession—is friendly enough, but not the company that Nicolo would have chosen for the long trek. He finds himself often looking to his right to toss a knowing look at Yusuf, only to find him missing. The weaver and his family had probably begun to wonder why Nicolo kept glancing at them. Well. He’d known Yusuf longer than the old weaver had known his wife, no doubt, so Nicolo would allow himself the odd habit.

The headman was also quite interested in telling long-winded stories to a fresh ear, so by the time the sun was setting, Nicolo was both very familiar with the crop rotation patterns of the group’s home village, and very ready to rush away to make his camp.

He cranes his neck to look over the crowd, and Yusuf catches his eye and waves.

“You look tired,” Yusuf observes when they reunite.

Nicolo groans. “Can we switch posts tomorrow?”

“Nicolò, my friend, you know I would do anything for you.” Yusuf claps his hands on Nicolo's shoulders. “But as you also know, I love to gossip, and one day into this journey, I know better than to be a willing ear for the headman.”

“You’ll leave me to his mercy, will you?” Nicolo sighs, unfolding their tent from one of the saddlebags.

“I would allow an old man the joy of a conversation with you,” Yusuf counters.

Nicolo tosses one end of the tent to Yusuf, who catches it. “For it to be a conversation, I would have to speak.”

Yusuf shrugs. “Nicolo, you of the wide blue eyes and open heart: you have the face of a priest. He wishes to confess to you.”

Raising an eyebrow, Nicolo asks, “And you have the face of a gossip, so the ladies at the back of the caravan confess to you?”

Yusuf spreads his hands magnanimously, like a king. “What can I say? I’m more fun.”

Yusuf has always been the friendlier of the two of them. Nicolo rarely meets a person who he does not like in some way—even the headman—but Yusuf, with his white smile and mischievous eyes, can make people like him without any effort at all. On most days, Nicolo is happy to be Yusuf’s humble shadow, letting Yusuf do the talking while Nicolo watches his back. Besides, when they are alone, Nicolo can make Yusuf laugh harder than any talkative stranger they meet.

However, when Yusuf is not physically by his side, the equation is thrown out of balance.

Nicolo smiles softly. “It is true, you are more fun.”

Yusuf raises his eyebrows at him. “I missed you today.”

Nicolo grabs the tent pole for something to do with his hands. Yusuf is always a fount of affection, but sometimes Nicolo needs to busy himself with something to match him. “I missed you as well.”

“We’re old men now!” Yusuf remarks, looping the fabric of the tent around Nicolo’s tent pole. “We cannot be expected to change our habits so easily.”

“This is true,” Nicolo muses. “How long has it been since we were apart for a full day?”

“Bulgaria?” Yusuf guesses.

“The cells had bars, we could still see one another.”

“This is a record, then.”

“It seems so.”

Nicolo unrolls his bedroll and tosses it into their tent. While they may be separated for waking hours, at least he’ll have Yusuf’s snores to fall asleep to as usual.

Yusuf pokes his head through the tent flaps. “I will take the first watch, you, the second?”

Nicolo rubs a hand over his face. Of course. “Yes, wake me then.”

Yusuf nods and disappears. This will be a long job.

::

The advantage of traveling in a fifty person group is that bandits rarely dare to take on so large an adversary. The disadvantage is that the bandits who do are particularly foolhardy and aggressive.

Nicolo feels some pity for them, these men who are so desperate that they would take on such odds. However, they also attacked a caravan of families unprovoked, so his pity only carries so far.

He and Yusuf have been fighting since before the bandits were born, so they dispatch them fairly quickly.

“Just like old times,” Yusuf jokes, wiping the blood from his scimitar. “Tell me, what was your name, handsome stranger? I had forgotten.”

Nicolo's lip twitches, and he is just thinking of a matching response when he hears an uncomfortably familiar gasp and gurgle.

The bandits had a compatriot, hiding in the bushes. A compatriot with a skill for throwing knives.

Yusuf falls to his knees, clutching at his crimson throat.

For all that they have become more skilled fighters than they ever could have dreamed in their mortal lives, they can still be caught by surprise. Even though Nicolo knows that Yusuf will recover, it always feels like a betrayal to let his friend die in the dirt.

Nicolo chases down the bandit. The man throws another knife. He feels the cutting pain in his chest, but his blood is hot and his heart boils over with rage. An eye for an eye, a neck for a neck. His sword cuts true, but he swings a second time for good measure. Then a third for spite.

There is blood on his mouth. Nicolo wipes it away, then hurries back to Yusuf.

He is still dead, and a wave of cold sweat rushes across Nicolo's body. Neither of them can discern the time it takes to heal. Sometimes it feels as though they are awakened in a blink, and other times, it is like this.

Nicolo can feel eyes from the caravan on the back of his neck. He crouches over Yusuf, shielding him from view. The families had hurried as far away from the bandits as they could, but Nicolo has to hope they cannot see the full damage wrought by the knife. He also wants privacy.

The days when he longed to see Yusuf dead are an old shame, now. Every time Yusuf has died since, Nicolo wonders if it will be the last time; punishment for Nicolo's foolishness in the early days.

Five seconds. Ten.

Yusuf worn down to a bleached skeleton, left to this lonely ravine for eternity.

Fifteen.

Silence every night, no steady beat of snores.

Twenty.

Who will tease him?

Twenty-five.

Yusuf coughs, and Nicolo's shoulders fall from their place around his ears. He clutches at Yusuf’s cheek.

Blearily, Yusuf opens a bloodshot eye. His hand travels up to hold Nicolo's in place.

“A long time?”

Nicolo nods.

“You got him? They are safe?”

Nicolo nods again.

Yusuf wheezes. “No need for tears then.”

Nicolo laughs wetly, but does not brush them away. He is not ashamed.

Yusuf pats his hand. “We are meant to be side by side; I cannot leave so easily.”

Overwhelmed by relief and suddenly overcome with weariness, Nicolo closes his eyes and bumps his forehead against Yusuf’s. It is warm there, and he lingers for a moment.

::

“Then I realized, the goat had been in the stable all along!” The headman chuckles. “They make fools of us all, don’t they, goats?

“Why, when I was a boy, I had a goat as good as any. Little Oyster, I called her. She had white and gray fur, you see, the same coloring as an oyster. Funny thing was, oysters were the one food she wouldn’t eat. She would eat anything on land, though. Once, she ate the ribbon off the end of my sister’s braid! Funny thing was, she would follow you anywhere, but if you tried to put a rope around her neck and pull her somewhere, she would refuse to follow. We were of a size then, she and I, so I would pull with all of my weight, and she would pull with all of hers, then neither of us would move an inch!” The headman looks expectantly at Nicolo.

“Ah, yes. Funny indeed.”

“Isn’t it! Funny thing was, she caused me nothing but trouble, but I missed her so when she was gone. Just like my wife.”

“Oh.” Nicolo had just been plotting an escape to patrol further ahead, but his heart would have to be made of stone to ignore this pivot in the conversation. “I am sorry for your loss.”

“Loss? Hmm, no.” The headman jerks his thumb towards the back of the caravan. “She’s back there.”

“Ah-“

“She has refused to speak to me these past months.”

“Oh.” Nicolo eyes the horizon and prays for more bandits.

“Women.” The headman heaves a sigh. “You know?”

Nicolo nods in a way that he hopes is vague enough to require no follow-up questions.

“We had a love marriage. I know, I know, I don’t look like the type, but in my younger days I was quite the passionate youth.” The headman raises his eyebrows wistfully. “Our parents hated each other, so of course that made her irresistible. But, eh, passion fades.” He flaps a hand dismissively. “How long do we live, if we are lucky? Sixty years, seventy? Who do you know who has managed to love each other all this time?”

He has, Nicolo registers with dim surprise, a point. While they had met old couples in their travels, most were amiable companions, paired by their parents long ago.

“You must be looking to find a wife, at your age?”

Nicolo shrugs, aiming once again for vagueness.

“Well, take advice from an old man. Let your parents pick you a suitable bride. Love, romance, sure enough, they’re flashy, but once the shine wears off, you’ll be bitter and old, trapped together because you cannot bear to be alone.” The headman’s voice twists in an ugly direction near the end. “It will spite you all the more because you will remember how it once was.”

The headman could probably use a reassuring hand on his shoulder and a few words to brighten him up, but Nicolo finds that all he can do is choke out, “I must range ahead, to scout out the path,” and take off on his horse.

He makes it to the ridge before he realizes his hands are shaking, shuddering on the reins. He cannot begin to imagine why.

::

**Later**

Their next series of jobs take them miles and years farther north than they have ever ranged before. Nicolo is thrilled by the sight of fresh snow after so many decades, while Yusuf curses as he wraps layer upon layer of wool around himself, pilfering Nicolo's blanket for good measure.

Icy winds aside, Nicolo enjoys this job quite a bit more than the last. They are guarding the front gate of a rich man who thinks he is more important than he is. While Nicolo has been known to tire of jobs that do not cater to a higher purpose, this does mean that he and Yusuf are largely left to their own devices, as the threats that the merchant fears exist only in his imagination. On this night, Yusuf’s has a whim to learn how to braid.

“Here, sit closer to the torch, so I can see.”

“So you can warm yourself?”

Yusuf rubs a hand over Nicolo's head good-naturedly. “Warm hands are skilled hands. This benefits us both.”

“It wouldn’t be my concern at all if you chose to practice on your own head.”

“You have longer hair!” Yusuf bundles together the hair in question, and tickles Nicolo's nose with it.

Nicolo scrunches up his nose. “Away, heathen.”

“Besides, these braids are in style here-“

“You and your _style_ are like a runaway bull in, I don’t know,” Nicolo thinks for a moment. “A shop selling glassware. No heed for-“

Yusuf combs a hand through Nicolo's hair, and Nicolo forgets what he was going to say.

His hair has grown long. After a series of ill-advised evenings with his knife and his blurry reflection in a creek, Nicolo gave up on it and settled for a cord to bind it near the nape of his neck. It never gets in his eyes, but the tangles that emerge bother him. He has seen women with hair to their shoulders, their ribs, all his life, and not one had mentioned the eye-watering experience of pulling their hair free of knots with a comb.

Nicolo braces himself for the pulling, but he should have known better. Yusuf, clever, gentle man, is pinching the bundle of Nicolo's hair with one hand, and teasing out the knots with his other, so Nicolo's scalp is spared. Between the two of them, they share the wisdom of one regular man.

After some time, Nicolo's hair is smooth around his shoulders, and Yusuf is trying to divide it into equal sections.

“Do you think it strange,” Yusuf says into the dark night, “that we haven’t met the women yet?”

“The women from our dreams?”

“No, the women who sell fish at the docks.”

Nicolo smiles, letting his eyes fall closed. “I think we shall meet them when God or fate places them in our path, just as we met.”

“I hope not _just_ as we met.”

Nicolo laughs softly. “We have become wiser since then.”

“Still...” Yusuf winds a strand of hair around his finger. “When I first dreamt of you, it was a matter of weeks before I saw you. With the women, it has been years.”

Nicolo shrugs. “Perhaps the time is not right for us to meet.”

“The more years that pass and we dream of them still, the more sure I am that they must be like us,” Yusuf says.

Nicolo leans his head into Yusuf’s hand, prompting him to continue his work. “One day, we shall see.”

Yusuf takes the direction and picks up Nicolo's hair again. “Aren’t you curious? To meet others like us?”

Nicolo reopens his eyes and gazes at the stars. “I suppose not,” he says, realizing it to be true as he says it. He is curious as to why the women appear in his dreams, but he has never yearned to meet other immortals. In his darker moments, he has wished to be mortal again, to slip back into the fold of humanity, but two more immortals, scattered across the earth? Perhaps it would be a novelty.

Yusuf does something with Nicolo's hair that pulls lightly. “I hope that they are. It would be like having a family again.”

Nicolo's eyebrows rise in surprise. “A family? We have never met them.”

“Yes...” Nicolo wishes he could see Yusuf’s face. “But two more people like us, how could we not feel a kinship? They could be the most ungracious, grating people I’ve ever met, and I would love them still. We keep walking this earth alone, you and I. Haven’t you wished for company?”

Nicolo lets his breath mist into the air, watching it rise. He has never wished for anyone but Yusuf. It had never occurred to him that he might be alone in the sentiment.

But Nicolo has never let himself be a greedy man, so he says, “It would be a pleasant addition.”

Yusuf hums in agreement. “There! Not so bad for a first try.” He places the end of the braid over Nicolo's shoulder so that he may see.

“It looks good,” Nicolo observes, based on no experience whatsoever.

Yusuf cranes his head around Nicolo's shoulder to look at his handiwork. “You know, Erik Olaffson told me the braids prevent tangles.”

“What a shame that I do not know how to fashion one,” Nicolo hints.

Grinning, Yusuf takes the bait. “I suppose I will have to do it for you.”

::  
**Ten Years Later**

After a decade traipsing through Northern Europe, Yusuf finally gets his way, and they wander south again. Eventually, the days grow hot enough that bathing in a convenient pond is no longer a shivering inconvenience, but blessed relief from the oven-hot air.

Nicolo is floating on his back, breathing his deepest, calmest breaths, when Yusuf splashes him. Nicolo squints his eyes further shut, and does not respond, prompting Yusuf to sweep a bigger wave of water straight into his face.

Yusuf tugs at his ankle, dragging him through the water. “Nicolo, friend of my heart, do not ignore me! I wilt from inattention! What if I were to drown while you lay idly by! You would weep for me then, wouldn’t you Nicolo?”

“Drown, then. I could use a moment of quiet.” Nicolo keeps his eyes closed.

As he often does when Nicolo is too stubborn to follow along with his foolish antics, Yusuf gives up and chooses to follow Nicolo's example instead.

A gentle wave rocks through the pond as Yusuf adjusts to float on his back. Nicolo lets his head sink back, and the water fills his ears again, blurring the sound of the hot summer’s day into something soft, like ripe fruit.

Yusuf reaches out to grasp Nicolo's hand, linking them together as they float. He picked up the habit when they were in Mecca, where male friends were known to walk down the street hand in hand to show their brotherhood. Yusuf had become enamored of the practice, though he liked to tease Nicolo that it was so he wouldn’t lose him in a bazaar to a stall of halva.

The further they traveled, the odder and more foreign they looked doing it—not that they ever blended in well, looking so different from one another to begin with—but Nicolo is not a liar, at least not to himself. He likes the warmth of Yusuf’s fingers. It is a balm against the _other matter_.

As if directed by Nicolo's thoughts, Yusuf, restless, stands up again, and Nicolo is presented with yet another mocking example of the _other matter_ in question.

It was not as though they never saw one another naked; war and stretching years of shared travel had long since stripped any modesty from them. Thus, Nicolo has always _noticed_ , but he has only recently begun to notice his own noticing, and this has caused no end of problems.

Even now, Yusuf is only pressing the water from his hair and wiping his eyes dry. Mundane. Practical. Entrancing. Wet. He is haloed by the sun as though God’s own hand wants to hold him up for glory. _Look what I have made. Weep._

Nicolo shuts his eyes. He should never have opened them; he had been keeping them closed all this time for exactly this reason. He wants Yusuf to hold his hand again. Grab his ankle. Flick his ear. Thrust his sword into his chest and breath into his mouth.

Yet, they have the long ocean of eternity ahead of them. These whims are nothing but an ocean swell under their ship, gone as soon as they come. Nicolo knows better than to jump overboard and drown alone trying to chase them.

Once allowing enough time for Yusuf to dress, Nicolo emerges from the water to find him gone entirely.

Instinctive panic strangles his heart before he remembers Yusuf telling him of his plan to visit the nearby village for supplies. Odd of him to not alert Nicolo of his departure, or ask for any requests, but what man did not feel flighty when the weather was so hot?

The sun is setting when Yusuf returns, later than expected.

Nicolo, who has been sheltering in their weather-beaten tent and trying not to worry, raises his head at Yusuf’s approach. “Did you get lost?” He asks, after determining that Yusuf is unbloodied.

Yusuf drops a bag laden with food with the rest of their supplies, then crawls into the tent and collapses face-first onto his bedroll. “No, I...made another stop.”

“Hmm?” Nicolo rests his head back against the rucksack he uses for a pillow.

“I saw a woman.”

“What woman?”

Yusuf turns his head and stares at Nicolo meaningfully. “A woman.”

Nicolo hears a faint buzzing between his ears. “A woman?”

Scrubbing a hand through his hair, Yusuf says, unusually quickly, “A woman! Like one of Madame Bisset’s girls.”

It has been a long time since Nicolo was a priest, and even then, he did not have wool stuffed in his ears every moment of the waking day. He knows what Yusuf means, and yet he finds himself saying, “A job, then? They need someone to drag away unruly customers, the same as Madame Bisset?”

Yusuf’s tone is harsher than Nicolo is used to hearing. “No, they needed someone to pay them coin in exchange for sex.”

Nicolo swallows hard and stares at the roof of the tent. Really, he should be surprised that they have not had this conversation earlier in their long acquaintance.

Into the silence, Yusuf says softly, “I’m sorry. My tone was harsher than I intended. I confess, I feel embarrassed. As a youth, I never imagined myself paying for such an encounter. I thought I would woo my future bride with my poetry...perhaps sneak a kiss onto her knuckles before we were married, and then...” Yusuf waves a hand through the heavy air to fill in the rest.

Nicolo had never considered any such thing for himself, but he can picture Yusuf playing such a part perfectly. The man has so much passion in him. Nicolo sees it in every family they help, every spirited conversation with a stranger on the road, and, yes, in his steady hand on Nicolo's shoulder. Yusuf overflows, and Nicolo cannot catch everything. In part, Nicolo is thankful for the woman for allowing Yusuf an outlet, though he is sad to hear the light layer of bitterness in Yusuf’s voice.

“And, you remember, when we met, I thought-“ he chuckles ruefully, casting his eyes over to Nicolo.

Nicolo has no idea what Yusuf is speaking of, but he nods to allow Yusuf complete his thought.

“So now, here we are,” Yusuf sighs.

“Madame Bisset would say you have nothing to be ashamed of, so long as you were courteous and paid well,” Nicolo murmurs.

“Of course I was courteous. I learned...quickly that the more my partner’s pleasure, the more mine.”

 _Christ in Heaven._ Nicolo’s fingernails dig into his palm, and his mouth waters.

“Will you be making a practice of these visits, then? Should we set aside earnings for it?” Nicolo's voice is driving towards lightheartedness with such determination that he sounds slightly hysterical.

“No.” Yusuf glances at him, askance. “Perhaps.” He scrubs a hand through his hair. “Perhaps in ten years.” He groans and readjusts himself on the bedroll. “It was like finding a muddy creek after a trip through the desert. A blessing, but not one I would take upon myself were I not so thirsty.” He winces. “Not to speak ill of the woman. Only she would not be who I might pick, if I had every option before me.”

“I know what you meant,” Nicolo reassures him. Yusuf does not have a cruel bone in him.

“Truly, if you were...interested also, I would make a recommendation-“

For a flying moment, Nicolo entertains the thought. If he went early tomorrow, perhaps she would still smell of him-

“No,” Nicolo blurts. “I think this is not for me.”

Yusuf nods to himself. “You have greater willpower than I.”

Nicolo closes his eyes and prays that this is true.

::  
**1197 AD**

Nicolo is a quick learner of languages—though not of accents, Yusuf is quick to point out—and even he cannot begin to pronounce the name of the village they have found themselves in.

Then again, that may be a result of the arak. His mouth tingles pleasantly of licorice, and his head tingles pleasantly of alcohol.

The gruff man at the head of the table deals out another stack of wilted cards to the five of them who sit around the table—new friends and competitors both.

The game is new to the two of them, but Nicolo is enjoying it immensely. To play well, one has to be good at holding a straight face and lying, which means Nicolo is winning, and Yusuf is losing. Of course, they are betting with their shared money, but the comfortable embrace of smugness is winnings enough.

Yusuf looks at his cards and winks at Nicolo. Winks! He is not good at this game. Nicolo loves him so dearly.

They make their wagers. Yusuf loses, and raises his glass of water in a toast to the winner.

Their dealer shuffles his cards, and Nicolo comments, “Perhaps you should not have winked.”

Yusuf snorts. “I did not wink.”

“You winked.”

“Maybe so,” Yusuf allows, upon further thought. “Did it make me look suspicious?” He winks again, to draw a giggle out of him.

Nicolo straightens his face and nods sagely. “Very suspicious. I do not trust you.”

“Is that so.” Yusuf smirks at him.

“No, that was a lie.” Nicolo's cheeks are very very warm. “But see! You believed me for a moment, and that’s why I’m better at this game.”

One of their table-mates deposits a bowl of olives onto the table, and the next round is put off for a moment as they chase after the salt.

“I disagree.” Yusuf tosses an olive into his pink mouth. “I can read you as well as one of your monks can read a manuscript.”

Sweet Yusuf. His braggart. “You cannot.”

“I have known you longer than any person!”

“And yet you lost to me in the last round.”

“A mercy, to spare your pride!”

Nicolo shakes his head and knocks back another dram of Arak. “I carry secrets you will never know.”

Yusuf looks at him thoughtfully, and Nicolo is reminded that _he_ is only drunk on water and good cheer. “This may be true, Nicolo, but I know this about you: you are only taunting me because you want me to ask what you mean, and then you want to tell me. Do you think I haven’t gambled with a knife’s edge before, too?”

Nicolo swallows with a dry throat. Caught out. He has been holding his hand closer and closer to the flame, partially for the warmth, and partially to see if he will burn.

Yusuf taps his cards against the table. “Better yet, I know this: I would be a foul friend if I dragged secrets from you after so many drinks. I set you free.”

Nicolo looks at him gratefully, but his next words are interrupted by a resounding crash from the far end of the bar. As much as the world seems to have changed in the past one hundred years, humanity still loves a bar fight. He reaches for another olive, but Yusuf catches his wrist. He is staring at the fighters in the corner in rapture.

“Nicolo,” his voice is shaking with excitement. “It’s them.”

Sure enough, once Nicolo catches a glimpse of the fighters’ faces, he knows them as well as he knows the back of his hand.

They are dressed like men and move like cats. Whatever foul-mouthed bar patron had insulted them is on the ground faster than Yusuf can rise from his chair.

The woman from the Far East spots them first, lighting up with recognition, and jumps over the ill-fated man to catch Yusuf in an embrace.

The other woman, more circumspect, but with a smile quirking the edge of her mouth, comes to clap a welcoming hand on Nicolo's shoulder.

“So we have found you at last.”

::

The next twenty-four hours are a blur of excited conversation. Andromache and Quynh are so immeasurably, uncountably old that Nicolo, who had excitedly procured a paving-stone sized slice of baklava for their one-hundredth birthday, feels like a bare-faced child.

Of the pair of them, Quynh is the more talkative, so she and Yusuf are a natural twosome. Andromache is more content to sit by the fire and chuckle when Quynh tells a story about a misadventure involving a horse and a spice merchant.

It is hard not to see their mirrors in Andromache and Quynh. Two friends, tied together through centuries, with a long history of bloody defeats and victories under their belts. They even speak their own language: a long simmered stew of something Nicolo might call Greek, and a few other dialects he cannot begin to untangle. Will he and Yusuf sound like this someday? Already, their quick patter of Arabic and Genoese is difficult for outsiders to follow, and on the rare occasion they drift close enough to Italy for Nicolo to speak Italian with others, he is teased for having the outdated vocabulary of a grandfather.

Andromache leans against a log and occupies herself by flipping a ragged-edged knife through the air. She has no reason to fear it cutting her fingers, but nevertheless, she does not fumble once. Nicolo is in awe of her. She must have forgotten more than he has ever known.

Yusuf was right: Nicolo does feel an immediate kinship with the two women.

Nicolo is broken from his reverie by the sound of Yusuf’s roaring laugh, while Quynh snorts around a gulp of her drink. Andromache shoots Nicolo a sly look. _Rowdy fools._

“Nicolo, Nicolo , you must tell her the story about the chicken coop,” Yusuf gasps between bouts of giggles.

Nicolo smiles bemusedly. “I don’t know that-“

Yusuf tosses a root vegetable at his head. “Come now, this beautiful woman just told such an embarrassing story for us, where is your knightly chivalry? You must share a story in turn.”

“I can think of an encounter between you and a fisherman in the Iberian Peninsula that might suffice.”

Yusuf flaps a hand. “Enough about me. It was in England, wasn’t it? A windy day, if I recall...?”

The rumbling pressure of expectant ears weighs heavy. Nicolo humors him. “It was a windy day, and a gust pulled my cap from my head and into a pen of chickens.”

Yusuf slaps his knee and grins in victory.

“So I went to retrieve it. But it had been many decades since I last parlayed with a live chicken, so I confess I had forgotten the wrath of a rooster when his territory is encroached upon.”

“Oh no!” Quynh’s eyes widen in anticipation.

“And all of the birds had swarmed about me, so to gather my cap from the ground, I had to reach my hand through the crowd of them, and when I leaned down, the rooster pecked my eye,” Nicolo explains quickly. “I fared worse in that fight than I did with a street tough the day before.”

“Nicolo,” Yusuf chastens in a sing-song voice, “that is not the story entire.”

Damn him and his beseeching eyes straight to hell. “So I was left to bleed from one eye—alone, I must add-“

Quynh shoots Yusuf a scandalized look, and he raises his hands. “I thought a Knight of Christendom could handle a bird!”

“I could handle a bird if the time called for it, but it was not my bird!” Nicolo protests. “I couldn’t kill the bird and deprive a farmer of his stock because I had been inconvenienced! So I turned to leave-“

“Flee-“ Yusuf corrects helpfully.

“And the gate to the pen had fallen shut so that the latch was-“ Nicolo clicks his tongue in annoyance, and asks Yusuf, in their language, “What’s the word? When it-“

“Jammed.”

“Jammed shut, so I could not shake it loose. But I was bleeding from one eye and my shins were taking a beating from the flock, so I didn’t want to bide my time leaving, and if I were to take my sword and hack my way out of the fence, the chickens would be freed, and-“

“And you couldn’t do that to the farmer.” Quynh nods in understanding.

“So instead, I had to climb to the roof of the chicken coop so that I could jump over the fence,” Nicolo finishes. “I am told that I was the picture of indignity.”

Yusuf catches his eye. What Nicolo does not say is that Yusuf had pressed his warm hands to Nicolo's cheek and brushed away the blood, and apologized sincerely for laughing when he realized how thoroughly Nicolo had been pecked. Were he mortal, he might have lost the eye.

But the mood around the fire is too light for that, and besides, that part of the story belongs to Nicolo.

“Well now, that was an embarrassing story,” Quynh allows, “But most of all, I now know that Nicolo is the type of man who would lose an eye before allowing a farmer to lose a chicken.” She raises an eyebrow. “Perhaps your friend is looking out for you after all, prompting a flattering story.”

Andromache grins wickedly, stretching a foot closer to the warmth of the fire. “I would not be so kind.”

Nicolo can see it, then: Their twosome become a foursome, a family, just as Yusuf had foreseen. Quynh’s winking mirth, Yusuf’s affectionate teasing, Andromache, cool and collected, rounding out the circle. Roaming across the land, doing good where they can find it, and taking solace in one another when they cannot. A community, the likes of which Nicolo has glimpsed at from a distance, but not touched in one hundred years. The idea settles warmly around him.

Then, Yusuf throws an arm around Quynh’s shoulder, and the two of them beam at each other, and Nicolo is filled with such a furious wave of unexpected nausea that he wants to drive his sword into the closest tree and scream into the unforgiving night air.

His ears fall dead to the conversation around him, and all he can see are Yusuf’s fingers, gently wrapped about Quynh’s shoulder. Yusuf has always been liberal with touch: clasping hands and making merry with many of the short-lived friends they have made in their travels. Nicolo has seen him cast an arm around someone else’s shoulders before—has he grown so covetous in the last few years that he can no longer stand it? When did he become so selfish? He does not starve for Yusuf’s touch—if he leaned into Yusuf’s other side in this moment, Yusuf would wrap his other arm around Nicolo and consider himself the richer for it.

Andromache flips her knife again, letting it fall towards her open face before she catches it, a bare centimeter before splitting her lip. She does not blink.

With two more immortal companions, who is Nicolo to Yusuf? Another friend in their cadre of undying warriors, equally beloved. Their one hundred years alone would fade into memory, and Yusuf would braid Andromache’s chestnut hair, and Quynh would fall asleep to the sound of his snoring, and Nicolo would be there also.

Yusuf has always wanted for more. Nicolo remembers the night, long ago, when he whispered of his dream to court a wife. Longer ago than that, his concern when they did not grow wrinkles. The day he realized they could never go back home. Yusuf overflows, and Nicolo is but one small clay cup.

He knows this, and yet he wants to spirit Yusuf away, and forget that they ever met Andromache and Quynh. He wants to dig a cave into a mountain of granite, drag Yusuf inside, and hole up the entrance.

Nicolo's stomach turns. Has it come to this? For so long, his love for Yusuf has been a bag he carries with him: sometimes it strains his shoulder and pains him, and sometimes he can forget it is even there. Never before has he wanted to shove Yusuf into it and tie closed the fastenings.

He runs a hand over his face. Yusuf lives in his heart, in his blood. He is embedded in Nicolo's flesh and one hundred years of memories. He breathes Yusuf, he dreams Yusuf, but he has finally become so deeply entwined with him that he can no longer truly be a friend to him.

Nicolo needs to cleanse himself of Yusuf until he can no longer remember why his heart would quicken in his presence. He needs the fire burning underneath his eyes to bank, and the ship to right itself. Eternity is long; one day he will look back upon this time and chuckle at his folly. He needs to leave.

::

When the evening concludes, Andromache and Quynh traipse back to their rooms at the inn in town, whilst Nicolo and Yusuf follow the familiar motions of setting up camp.

“Quynh and Andromache must make more coin than we do,” Yusuf muses as he lays out the ground cover, “to always stay in inns.”

“Perhaps after one thousand years of making camp, they got bored.”

“And one thousand more years of experience than we have—that merits a higher fee.”

Nicolo shrugs. “That as well.”

“Did you hear Quynh say- I think you might have fallen asleep at the fire- she and Andromache are traveling to India—of course they want us to join them—imagine that! Farther east than you or I have ever cast our ambitions, and they have visited several times.” Yusuf shakes his head. “I am reminded that we are shorebirds, barely scratching the surface of a vast ocean.”

Nicolo nods mutely.

“Do you think we will need different clothes for the journey? I didn’t think to ask Quynh what the climate might be like.” Yusuf’s eyes light with mischief. “Imagine what local fashions I could find to annoy you with.”

In the expectant pause, Nicolo realizes that now is as good a time as any. He feels like a child confessing to his mother that he has smashed an urn. “I do not think I will be joining.”

“No?” Yusuf pauses with the tentpole. “Why would we not go?”

Nicolo cannot bring himself to look Yusuf in the eyes and keep a casual tone at the same time. “No, you should go. I would prefer to stay here. We haven’t truly completed our job here-“

“What, guarding merchant stalls from pickpockets?” Yusuf shakes his head in confusion. “We were biding our time with that job, why would we stay here?”

“No, I mean that I would stay here.” Of course Yusuf cannot follow what Nicolo is saying; when in one hundred years has Nicolo suggested that they part? As casually as two people planning different routes for their errands, at that.

“But I would leave with Quynh and Andromache?”

“Yes.”

Yusuf scratches his nose thoughtfully. “Nicolo, I don’t follow you.”

Nicolo wants to shake his head and agree, say he was making a poor joke and to leave it be, but he cannot be a coward. “I think it best that we be separate for a time,” he says simply.

The tentpole slips loose from Yusuf’s hands and he curses, scrambling to pick it up. “Why is this? I thought you liked Andromache and Quynh,” he says, finding the heart of the matter with a bloodhound’s instinct, “you called them ‘sisters’ when we broke fast this morning!”

“I do like them, and that is why...” Nicolo flounders, “Why now is such a good time for me to leave—you’ll have them as your company.”

“But you would be alone.”

“I have a need to be alone,” Nicolo lies.

Yusuf narrows his eyes. “You are lying to me.”

He is, and he is a shame-faced worm, and Yusuf could have beaten him at cards in two seconds flat the other night if he had wanted to.

“I’m not,” Nicolo says desperately. “I need to be away from you!”

Yusuf, with one hand a bare inch away from Nicolo's shoulder, stops short. “Ah. That. Is different from wanting to be alone.” 

He smiles the strangest smile Nicolo has ever seen. His mouth stretches wide across his face, but his eyes are still as stone. “I should not have pressed. I always press you, gentle Nicolo.” Yusuf’s eyebrows furrow. “I cannot begrudge you time for yourself. How long do you need?”

How long for Nicolo to forget? Two hundred years? He knows Yusuf would never let that lie, so he shrugs and says, “Some time. We shall see.”

Judging by Yusuf’s expression, that answer might have been worse, but the man nods stiffly nevertheless.

They raise the tent in silence. In their bedrolls, shoulder to shoulder, Nicolo closes his eyes and commits the feeling of Yusuf’s arm against his to memory. He will begin forgetting tomorrow. Then Yusuf will forget too, and his stung feelings will soothe. In some time, they will greet each other as brothers again.

“If,” Yusuf’s voice is a bullwhip cutting across the dead silence of the tent, “if this is about the... _other matter_. I promise you, it is no issue.”

Nicolo's heart stops in his chest. He hopes for a crazed moment that he is having a heart attack, which might at least delay this conversation for a few moments.

“I didn’t think you knew,” he whispers, horrified. How long had Yusuf known? Nicolo had hoped to keep this from him always, but he should have known better. He cannot lie to Yusuf, who somehow even knows the secret name Nicolo uses for it inside of his own mind.

Yusuf makes a questioning sound. “Of course I knew, I am not so oblivious to matters of the heart as some men claim to be.”

Nicolo's cheeks are blazing so red in the dark that he thinks Yusuf must be able to see them. “My aim is to let the feelings fade with distance. Then, we can meet again on more stable footing,” he confesses.

“Oh.” In the quiet, Nicolo swears he can hear Yusuf’s eyelashes brush against his fine cheek. “I confess, that solution had never occurred to me. I wasn’t sure there was enough time or distance in the world to let the feelings fade.”

Most days, Nicolo appreciates Yusuf’s love of a joke, but here, now, it stings. If they were going to have his conversation, he would have hoped to see Yusuf’s compassionate side, and instead he is being treated to a flippant joke about Yusuf’s attractiveness.

“Yes,” He exhales in wounded exasperation, “you truly are a prize among men. I am but one in a line of many broken hearts, yes yes yes.”

Silence falls in the tent again. Nicolo hears Yusuf exhale, then inhale slowly. “Nicolo,” his voice is very even. “What are you talking about.”

Nicolo wants to dig himself a grave with his own teeth. “What? You can make a joke but I cannot?”

Yusuf’s hand reaches out in the dark and roots around until it can wrap around Nicolo's wrist. Nicolo tenses and makes to pull himself away

“Nicolo, Nicolo,” Yusuf’s voice is urgent. His hands hold tight. “Please, Nicolo.” He is hoarse. “Tell me, what was your secret?”

“What?”

“The other night, over cards. I said I would never pull it from you, and I meant it then, but now, now, I think we are hanging from the edge of a cliff and you have the rope.”

Nicolo gapes in confusion. 

“Please, Nicolo.” Yusuf’s hands are sweaty on his. “What did you think I meant when I said the ‘other matter’?”

Nicolo screws his eyes shut. He is powerless to resist Yusuf’s voice when it falls urgent like this. If Yusuf wants to hear the words from his own lips straight, so be it.“That I love you.”

He finds himself surprisingly free upon saying it. Like he had been a bird pretending not to have wings for years, only to spread them wide.

Flying, he says, “I have loved you for so long that I cannot pinpoint the time or place that it began. I’ve carried it with me for years, but I could not—you said it yourself—you would love anyone who was like us. We are shackled together by fate; what does it mean for me to love you?” Nicolo swallows sharply and speaks his deepest fear into existence: “What would it mean if we were to try, and we failed? I would rather be your friend for eternity than be unable to look at you.”

Yusuf inhales so raggedly that Nicolo is reminded of the time he caught a spear through the lung. “Nicolo, Nicolo,” he murmurs, “My Nicolo.”

He feels the brush of Yusuf’s beard against his face first, a warning volley of arrows, before Yusuf kisses him.

Nicolo drowns, and is reborn, and dies again. Time, a concept which has already become flexible to him, stops completely. Yusuf’s chest against his chest. His heartbeat. His hand combed through Nicolo's hair. The smell of pomegranate.

This, too, he commits to his memory. He locks it in a secret vault like a thief, so he can pull it out from time to time to covet, then hide it away again.

Nicolo pulls away. Kind Yusuf. Compassionate to a fault. He even follows Nicolo's mouth for a moment.

Nicolo rests his hand against Yusuf’s cheek, partially for the comfort of Yusuf’s cheekbone against his thumb, partially for protection, to hold Yusuf’s face away.

“I do not require this,” he whispers into the space between them. “You will always be the friend of my heart, Yusuf. I will return.”

Nicolo had predicted Yusuf correctly; he pushes against Nicolo’s hand to come closer. “Hmm?”

“I would never want anything from you not freely given. You would do anything for me, Yusuf, but-“ Even thinking it turns his stomach. “I do not want your kindness, or your pity.”

Yusuf’s breath is a warm cloud against his neck. “How...” his voice is wondering, “is it possible you don’t know?”

Nicolo knocks his forehead against Yusuf’s. “Know what?”

“Do you think that I do not love you too?”

“Of course I know you love me, Yusuf,” Nicolo dismisses him. Yusuf is happy to declare as much when Nicolo makes a successful pot of tea.

“No!” Yusuf exclaims, surging to his elbows. “I mean that I love you beyond brotherhood, or friendship, or whatever immortal tie you imagine holds us together like prisoners. I’ve held you in my heart since almost the day we met. But you did not feel the same, so I set my love aside in a basket so you would not have to carry it.” Yusuf laughs sharply. “This was the _other matter_ I spoke of. I thought I was pushing you without realizing, that you were sick of me panting after you, so you wished to be away from me.”

It seems impossible, but Yusuf would never lie to him. Nicolo feels dizzy. How long had they been talking past one another, two blind wanderers in the desert, dodging each other by feet, certain they were alone? Nicolo thought he was protecting Yusuf by staying quiet, preserving their sacred bond, yet all this time, longer than Nicolo had been aware of it himself, Yusuf had been holding himself back? 

They might wake up tomorrow and regret saying any of this, but Nicolo has never been able to resist giving Yusuf whatever he wants, and together, in the soft blue dark of the tent, concerns of eternity seem to fade away. If they could murder each other over and over again and emerge as friends, they can do this too, whatever the risk. 

He would say this, but he realizes abruptly that he is sick of talking. He pulls Yusuf to him again.

Once, he rode into his first battlefield and compared it to being swept into a storm. Now, he realizes that every fight he has ever cut through was a light mist, and this is the storm. They ride through waves together, rocking against each other, crashing into one another. Overwhelmed. Overtaken. Gasping for breath. Nicolo holds Yusuf to him as though he might be swept away.

He knows every part of Yusuf’s body, and yet, under his hands, it feels undiscovered. The taut curve of his shoulder, the ripple of his rib cage, his sides—where Nicolo knows Yusuf is ticklish—the ridge of his hip bones, crafted for the benefit of Nicolo's thumbs. His hands drift under Yusuf’s tunic, and Yusuf, for once, unconcerned with clothes, tears it off. Insistent that they be equal in all things, he prompts Nicolo to do the same.

Nicolo does, and they fall back into the bedroll, waves smashing into a rocky shore. Yusuf’s arm tunnels between Nicolo's back and the ground, and he pulls them tighter together. Nicolo can hardly breathe. He does not need to anyway; they may as well stay like this always.

Once, when Yusuf had left him to hunt a wild rabbit, Nicolo had taken time alone with himself to imagine Yusuf like this. He had felt so guilty when Yusuf returned that he had never done it again. Not a terrible choice, as Nicolo was discovering that his imagination had failed him on many counts. For one, he imagined Yusuf would be more suave, sure. Instead, he can detect a faint tremble as Yusuf touches him. Nicolo has no doubt that his hands echo Yusuf’s: a holy sculpture has fallen into his grasp and he hardly knows what to do with it.

He wants to rip off Yusuf’s remaining clothes and burn them. He wants to tuck Yusuf’s face into his neck and count each of his curls. He wants to make Yusuf smile sweetly, and then lick all of his teeth. He has never felt so greedy in all of his life, and he has never relished it so much.

Yusuf slides against him again, and Nicolo decides that he will start with clothes.

He pulls at Yusuf’s waistband, and Yusuf makes a noise into his ear that Nicolo has never heard him make before, then whispers something in Arabic, almost too quiet to hear.

“What did you say?” Nicolo matches Yusuf for softness.

“I...” Yusuf moves to help Nicolo remove the last of his clothing. “I’ve never taught it to you. It was too...ah...too lewd to teach.”

Nicolo is almost distracted from the new expanse of bare skin. Almost. “Well, what did it mean?” It is fair turnabout to make Yusuf squirm a little.

Yusuf mangles his way through a translation of a sentence that, knowing Yusuf, was probably poetic in the original Arabic. In Italian, it’s so filthy that Nicolo feels his heartbeat pump through every inch of his body.

“Well,” Nicolo chokes out, “I think we can achieve that.”

They are shipwrecked in the storm.

::

Later, sleep whispers a tempting song in his ear, but Nicolo pushes it away for a time. He is not finished counting Yusuf’s curls.

Suddenly, a thought occurs to him. “Yusuf, earlier-“

Yusuf hums appreciatively into Nicolo's chest.

“Earlier than that,” Nicolo gently tugs at his hair. “You said that you knew I did not feel the same.”

“Mmm,” Yusuf makes a noise of remembrance. “Yes, what changed?”

“What?”

“When we have spoken of this,” Yusuf gestures between their bare bodies, “in the past, you never showed an interest. So of course, I stopped raising the subject. But what changed since then?” Yusuf lifts his head just enough to give him a roguish smile. “Was it those weeks in Egypt when it was too hot to wear more than a cloth?”

“When did we ‘speak of this’, in your dreams?” Nicolo has lost a lot to the roaming sands of memory, but he would have remembered this.

Yusuf looks at him in confusion. “Of course we spoke about it. I tried to woo you the first day we met!”

“And I sprouted feathers and flew across the Mediterranean.”

“I compared your eyes to the shining blue sky and told you that I would never need to see the sun again if only I could look into your eyes.”

Nicolo laughs softly in disbelief. “You told me my eyes were blue. And I only remember that because I was proud that you had managed a sentence at all.”

“Well,” Yusuf tilts his head in acceptance. “Perhaps that one was more for my own entertainment. The idle thoughts of a soldier beset by a beautiful face.” He sobers. “The rest, though. You must remember.”

“Truly, Yusuf, I have no idea.”

Yusuf doesn’t look at him, choosing instead to trace his fingers across the line of Nicolo's collarbone. “In Constantinople?”

Nicolo shakes his head.

“We had just dispatched those thieves who were threatening the baker, and I held you close to me and said to you that I wished to be side-by-side with you always.”

Nicolo waits for the rest, then realizes that was all. “I don’t remember that. I’m sure I thought it was one of your heartfelt declarations of friendship.” He gazes at the top of Yusuf’s head, wondering what else he might have missed. “Yusuf, that was so long ago.”

Yusuf nods. “It was.”

“Even then?”

Yusuf presses a kiss into his chest. “Even then.”

They were so early into their immortality in Constantinople. Then, Nicolo knew only that they were meant to be together; he could not have imagined their lifespan. Had he understood, would he have agreed? Could he have skipped all of these decades wishing for Yusuf’s touch? The idea thrills him, but how could he wish they had followed a different path when this moment was so sweet?

“And there was Vezelay, then London, then Sigurd,” Yusuf prompts, but Nicolo shakes his head once again. “Truly? I thought I was being so plain.”

Nicolo traces the curve of Yusuf’s ear. He has never touched it before this day, and now is sure that there is not a finer ear on this earth. “What did you say?”

Yusuf shrugs. “The exact words, I don’t remember, but that I had never known a better man, that I wanted to sleep next to you each night and wake with you each morning, that I wanted to share all of my life with you.”

The smallest of bells rings in the back of Nicolo's mind. “I do remember this, at least in part. But Yusuf,” he says, realizing their mistake, “don’t you see, we already fell asleep and woke next to one another! I thought you were the best man I knew, and wanted to be together always.” Nicolo exhales into a laugh. “We were already so entwined with one another that I thought, I thought you were repeating what we already knew.”

Yusuf shakes his head in wonderment. “I thought you were pushing me off gently. I gave up after Sigurd, I thought I would reach the end of your patience.”

Nicolo is overcome. He buries his face in Yusuf’s hair. He knows how Yusuf must have felt, doing that, because he had done the same. Mirrors of each other on the battlefield, they also mirror each other in foolishness. But of the two of them, Yusuf had gritted his teeth and soldiered on in good faith, while Nicolo hatched plans to run away.

“I’m sorry, Yusuf, for being so dense.”

Yusuf shakes his head. “We have nothing but time. You and I can be as stupid as we wish.”

Nicolo chuckles at that. In his long life, he has always been sure of the truth, until he discovers himself to be completely incorrect. He looks forward to being wrong many more times.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay I kind of wrote a [spiritual successor](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26171722) to this fic. 
> 
> Also, I have a [tumblr](https://optimismology.tumblr.com/) if you prefer to get your updates over there.


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